This invention relates to retail coupon documents.
Previously proposed in Krost U.S. Pat. No. 4,817,990 is a retail coupon document in which two coupons (or values) are hidden from the consumer and wherein one of the coupons (or values) is destroyed by the consumer in response to opening the coupon document. A manufacturer is able to issue or sponsor such a coupon document in order to target the users of a competitor's product and present them with an incentive for switching to the sponsor's product. That is, each of the hidden coupons would present the consumer with a value (e.g., a discount) for using the sponsor's product. However, one of the coupons would offer a greater value than the other and would be directed to the user of the competitor's product.
Such direction would be accomplished by means of instructions imprinted on the front side of the document. Those instructions would be calculated to ensure that the opening technique employed by users of the competitor's product would result in the lesser value coupon being destroyed and the greater value coupon being revealed. Conversely, the opening technique employed by users of the sponsor's product would result in the greater value coupon being destroyed and the lesser value coupon being revealed. The greater value received by the user of the competitor's product would serve as an incentive to switch products.
The coupon document itself constitutes two paper panels glued together along their borders. Each panel thus presents a hidden side (which faces the hidden side of the other section) and a exposed side (which constitutes the front or rear side of the coupon document). Two coupons are imprinted on one of the inner sides in an overlapping fashion, and instructions for opening the coupon document are imprinted on one of the exposed sides. Those document-opening instructions require the user to sever the panels along predefined division lines which are visible to the user. The user is instructed to chose between two different division lines, depending upon whether the user is a user of the competitor's product or the sponsor's product. The user will reveal a coupon for the sponsor's product regardless of which division lines are chosen. However, the division lines presented to users of the competitor's product serve to destroy the lesser value coupon and reveal the greater value coupon, whereas the division lines presented to the user of the sponsor's product serve to destroy the greater value coupon and reveal the lesser value coupon.
It has been found that division lines comprised of, for example, conventional perforations such as disclosed in Fishkin U.S. Pat. No. 3,734,544, may present a serious shortcoming by excessively weakening the structural integrity of the revealed (surviving) coupon. That is, after the user opens the coupon document along a selected one of the perforated division lines, the revealed coupon will also possess the perforations of the non-selected division lines. The presence of those remaining perforations in the revealed coupon makes the revealed coupon susceptible to being accidentally separated along those perforations as a consequence of the coupon being handled by the user.
A variation of the Krost coupon document has been previously proposed in which the coupon includes a means or tool for tearing along the division lines, namely, a pair of zipper pulls which are integral with one of the panels. Those zipper pulls form manually actuable tools which effectively cut through one of the panels (but not the other panel) along the perforated division lines when pulled by the user. Although this variation requires that only one of the panels of the coupon document be cut, it still embodies the earlier described shortcoming wherein the revealed coupon is excessively weakened by the presence of the non-selected perforated division lines.